Seventy Seven Thousand Service Trees - a vast poetry collection by Sri Chinmoy
Wed, 08/15/2007 - 21:16 — Shane Magee
Poetry has always been Sri Chinmoy's forte, and he has been composing poems ever since his early teens. However, has he gets older, his poetic rate of output only seems to increase, and he is currently over half way towards completing his largest collection yet - an amazing 77,000 poem-aphorisms, published serially in a 77-volume collection called "Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees".
The aphorisms themselves are typical of Sri Chinmoy's poetic style since he came to the west - short haiku-like pearls of reflection that turn the aspiring reader's thoughts inward towards the source of his or her being:
Where is God?
Definitely not in
A complexity-mind.
Where is God?
Unmistakably inside
A simplicity-heart.
Think of the very first day
You accepted the spiritual life.
Immediately you will get back
Your intensity, your purity,
Your love of God.
The poems reveal themselves most fully when not read in isolation, but as part of a 'reading meditation' where one moves from one poem to the next, traversing an inner landscape in which these aphorisms serve only as signposts. The myriad topics covered by the poems reflect the entire palimpsest of experiences that is a spiritual seekers life - you could find on one page a poem reflecting a blissful experience of oneness with the Creator, and on the same page find a poem where Sri Chinmoy puts himself in the shoes of the countless seekers of truth who are still struggling with their imperfections on the way to the Goal.
Over the years, Sri Chinmoy has composed over 100,000 thousand poems, but he has never had any concern that the sheer number of poems might affect their resulting quality. " People often think that if you care for quantity, then you have to sacrifice quality.", he says. "I feel this need not be true if there is inner guidance. If we can have a free access to our Inner Pilot, who inundates us with inspiration, then quality need not be sacrificed for the sake of quantity." Though a lifetime of prayer and meditation, Sri Chinmoy has established an inseparable oneness with the "Inner Pilot", and all his creative works can be viewed as outward spontaneous flows from that inner source.
The sheer size of the project underscores another key part of Sri Chinmoy's philosophy - self-transcendence. He has already completed compilations of 10,000 and 27,000 poems, but upon each completion he is already looking forward to the next goal - sitting on his his laurels is an alien concept to him. If he keeps up his rate of four thousand poems a year, he would be on schedule to finish the collection by 2015: after that, can anyone bet on what new feat he will attempt next?
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